Ghost Lives
by planet p
Summary: AU; The last she remembers, she was marking time in Heaven.


The playground is deserted, the grass withered and greying, flattened against the sandy ground by the wind and time. The sky is clear and blue, overhead, as she sits on the scorching hot metal of the roundabout, warmed by the beating sun, and runs her hand through her hair, clumps of dirty blonde hair coming loose at her touch.

She misses her mother, and the motel over the way, as dilapidated and abandoned as the rest of this ghost town out in the middle of the desert God knows where is offering no favours to her mounting heartache. She doesn't know why she's here, she only knows that she shouldn't be because this is Earth and she's dead... she _was_ dead. The last she remembers, she was marking time in Heaven, and then... she woke up here, in the dirt, her skin itching from the sand already, dressed in a flimsy summer dress that evoked something out of the fifties, if what she could see of it was anything to go by.

Where exactly this is, she has no idea. She's not even wearing shoes and her right ankle is itching something fierce, as though she'd been stung by something, maybe an ant. She's trying not to itch it, trying not to rip out any more of her hair, and trying to keep her calm and refrain from crossing the road to the motel and lying down and crying herself to sleep in the middle of the day.

She's got to be alert in case anyone turns up, friend or foe. She still isn't sure if she's dreaming and all this is some crazy illusion, or if maybe she has been summoned back from Heaven by some entity that remains out of sight. If maybe she's been thrown back in time with a mission to complete, not even wearing any shoes. It seems a bit far-fetched to her mind. Surely they'd have given her shoes?

Her throat is dry and the roundabout burns when she lies back and gazes up at the blue, blue sky, not a single cloud in sight. She could die for a drink right now, for a glass of cool water, but this is a ghost town and she doubts very much that she'll find any running water, even if she searches all day.

The wind whistles in the trees, making them shiver some, and sand blows in her eyes. She covers her face with her hands and tells herself she isn't going to cry, but she's tired and alone and she can't really even motivate herself to do anything. She's not helping herself but she can't be stuffed to do so, as though every bit of drive in her has been bled dry.

She's probably going to catch a nasty sunburn out here, but she can't even be bothered getting up and getting under some shade.

Or finding a road out of this place.

After a while, she dozes off. When she wakes, the sun is in almost exactly the same position it had been before, so she figures, blinking back watery tears from gazing at the sun too long, she can't have been out so long.

She gets up and wanders away across the playground, over the road to the motel, hoping to find some clues as to where exactly she is, even just to which state she's in, or the name of this once-town.

The motel – Dusty Slopes Motel – doesn't offer much in the way of answers, just a lot of misdirection if the name is anything to go on. There are no mountains anywhere around, so, by extension, there are no slops – the place is as flat as a tack and just as drop dead boring.

She manages to cut her foot on some broken glass in the motel and decides to leave the motel to the dust and sun and its little inhabitants, the insects and rats, if there are any rats. There aren't even any beds left, not even any cupboards, nothing to go on at all.

She wonders aimlessly down the black, burning hot road, covered in dust and assorted weedstuff, her feet sizzling on the hot top and the sun burning on her parched skin, hair blowing into her face that she doesn't even bother to brush away, the pain in her foot from the glass she'd had to pull out, leant heavily on an unstable wall and grimacing, urging her on.

The main street is just as deserted as the rest of the place and she refrains from sighing, or bursting into tears, but hops up onto the cracking side walk and heads for the nearest tree cover, an old jacaranda, and plonks herself down on the ground, leaning her back against the hard bough. The jacaranda is the only tree in the whole street, which is pretty sad to say, but it's a ghost town so she supposes nobody really cares anymore.

An army of little ants are marching up the bough but they ignore her and she ignores them, her eyes drifting close once more as fatigues settles in deep inside her bones, eclipsing even the stinging pain in her foot, no doubt clogged up with dirt and just itching for an infection at the wonderful care she's taken of it.

She sleeps and dreams of sand dunes, endlessly shifting, and sand, so much sand, washing over her like water, sometimes drowning her, sometimes letting her up for air.

When she opens her eyes, someone is standing close by, in front of her, actually, probably staring at her, she imagines, but she can't even muster up the energy to find it creepy. _Oh, look_, she thinks, _a ghost. Or something. It's just like old times, right?_

She pushes the hair from her face and tucks it behind an ear, but most of it comes out and drifts from between her fingers to land on her skirt as she peers up at the stranger through disinterested eyes and realises she knows this person. Well, no, not the person actually, the thing wearing the person. She wouldn't know jot about the person, but she knows this demon, and if she's met a bigger jerk, she can't recall.

She probably hates the guy, but just not right now. She's too tired and thirsty and hungry to hate him right now. "What's a girl gotta do to get an ice-cream 'round here?" she asks, offering her hand, but the demon doesn't so much as offer a helping hand back and she stumbles to her feet all by herself, pushing more hair from her face.

"Are you the idiot who brought me here?" she asks, giving up the pretence of small talk finally. The guy apparently only smiles when he's messing someone over or torturing things gorily.

He winks at her and clicks his tongue as though to say, "you got it, girly", but he doesn't say that, he just stays quiet, leaning forward to scoop up her hand quickly and examine it. Picking at a nail, the whole thing comes off disgustingly and drops the the ground.

"Yuck," she comments blandly, wondering why that happened, why her whole body is falling to bits before her very eyes; even her vision is slightly blurry, now. She can't quite make out the expression on the man's face, but figures it isn't a happy one.

She presses a hand to her middle and feels around a bit, but everything feels intact so she figures that rules out that. She's not a zombie. Nobody went back in time to save her from exploding to bits and dumped her ass here to bleed out and die, then brought her back to life somehow spooky.

It's something else that's wrong with her.

"What's the diagnosis, doctor?" she asks, feeling him slide a hand across her forehead.

"This body is dying."

"Gee, _shock_! Never would've guessed it! Shit, this _is_ bad! What _am_ I going to do?" She laughs. It hurts. "Why did you bring me here, Crowley?" Her voice has acquired a growl that seems to rip from her throat, excruciating pain along with. Tears roll down her cheeks but she doesn't drop the death glare she's fixing the blurry image before her with.

"Do you know what I asked for? What I sold my soul for?"

She rolls her eyes. "Let me guess – fame and fortune? A nice, little get-out-of-jail-free card, a solve-all for your murderous ways?"

"I asked to be normal." His tone suggests a trace of sadness.

She reached up a hand to feel his cheek, brushing away his tears roughly. "Normal in what way?" she asks, but her voice comes out more as a wobbly croak. She hopes he caught her question because she doesn't feel like repeating it. The pain coursing through her veins is far from joyful. The tears are still coming down her face occasionally and she can't do a thing to stop them; it's just the pain making itself known. Her insides don't feel so good anymore, as though they're slowly being shredded from the inside out, and the pain transforms her face into something ugly, makes her take her hand from his face and clutch her middle in agony.

Yep, he's definitely onto something. If her body isn't dying, it's sure doing something funky painful, something it probably shouldn't be doing.

A scream rips from her throat as blood and gore stains her dress, spilling down her legs and laying on the hard, dry earth, reluctant to soak in.

He tilts back her head with shaking hands and kisses her.

And then the pain is just gone, as though it had been little more than a nightmare all along, and he'd merely woke her, given her arm a little shake.

"I had a family once. A wife, children. A boy and a girl, actually. Twins. When they were young, they fell ill. My wife was convinced they would soon pass from this world, but they did not die. I _helped_ them. My wife didn't understand what I'd done and so she was happy, for a time, happy our children had been spared. The kids were happy, everyone was happy. _I_ was happy.

"But my daughter had inherited my ability and she told her brother. He didn't tell his mother then, but he made no secret of his opinion that it was wrong. He grew cold to me, he blamed me for passing this thing along to his sister, for helping him when he'd been ill as a boy, for making him an accessory to my crime, as we say nowadays.

"When my daughter fell pregnant and then dreadfully ill, she sacrificed herself so that the baby could live. Her brother never forgave me. He blamed me for all of it. I think he was jealous we'd been so close. He told his mother and she blamed me. She refused to have anything to do with her granddaughter and forbade me from doing so, either. She said she'd never known our daughter to have any men friends and it may well have been _my_ child.

"I wasn't very well about to stick around for that, so I left. I didn't know her anymore and I didn't see any future for a friendship between my son and I. He _despised_ me. I didn't try to find the baby. I was afraid that if I touched her, she'd be cursed with this damned affliction that had saved my daughter once only to take her from me at a later date. I left them all.

"At first, I thought to take my own life as my daughter had, helping someone else to live, to be with her again in the afterlife. But I didn't deserve that privilege; I'd failed to save her and abandoned her child to the cold, cruel world, the one person she'd given up her very life for, I'd treated as though she were little more than a monster. But she wasn't the monster, she'd never been a monster, just a baby. _I_ was! I was the monster, Jo!

"I stopped helping people who would, some of them, just as easily look on me as some kind of monster for that help and sold my soul for a healthy dose of reality. My son was right, in the end. I was a monster. The least I could do was be true to myself.

"I don't want this disgusting thing!" he spits, at last. "I wanted my family to love me! I wanted _someone to love_! But this _thing_, it didn't want that – it wanted me all for itself! But I won. I beat it!" He laughs shakily, his eyes glimmering darkly. "I won."

The pain is gone now and Jo's breathing is surprisingly steady, surprisingly easy. Even her vision is clear, better. "What happened to your granddaughter?" she asks.

"Don't know, don't care," he replied, snapping back to his usual self slowly, indifference colouring his voice dully. He's not going to start crying again.

"I'd been going for Samuel's girl, you know, but I'm afraid she's incommunicado – so I chose you instead, sunshine." He takes hold of her arm and, in the blink of an eye, the ghost town is replaced by another, very much alive town. They're standing in the parking lot of some dreary-looking motel and Jo notes the familiar, black '67 Chevrolet Impala.

Crowley smacks her bottom. "Be free, Bambi!"

She throws him a dirty glare. "Bambi was a _he_!" she growls, feeling a sudden swell of gladness at the lack of pain, at the menace in her voice.

"She was?" He tucks some hair behind her ear and nods to one of the motel rooms behind her. "Off you go, dear."

"Why are you doing this?" she growls.

"Is that a trick question, Harvelle?" He sighs. "Let's just put it this way, lassie: when the time comes, I'd prefer you be the one."

She glares at him and starts to say, "What the Hell do you mean by that, you lousy excuse for a-" but he disappears before she can make the mistake of calling him a human being. He hasn't been a human being for a long, long time.

She swallows a sigh and closes her eyes for a long moment, praying this isn't some kind of crazy dream, and then she turns to face the motel room and her future.


End file.
